Outside a beige metal building in Nederland, colossal satellite dishes catch invisible signals that later appear on television screens in the homes of Time Warner Cable subscribers.

Some subscribers, upset with the recent removal of two channels from their expanded basic cable packages, are considering installing their own, much smaller, satellite dishes in response to the changes.

With a dish already planted on his roof, Groves retiree John DeVillier is willing and ready to make the switch from cable to satellite if Time Warner doesn't keep him happy.

Similar receivers on three neighbors' roofs are evidence that although it's the sole cable company in the region, Time Warner doesn't have a monopoly, according to DeVillier, who told The Enterprise he is irritated by the recent removal of the movie channel Multiplex from his line-up.

Others, like Patti Barras, a retiree living in Orange, are upset with the loss of the TV Guide Channel, a decision motivated by a desire to conserve bandwidth, according to the company.

"I'm just real disappointed they did this," she said, adding that she will consider switching to satellite, as well as other options.

Nationwide, satellite television has gained some ground, but cable still is king according to the latest figures from the Federal Communications Commission, which show that in 2006 about 68.2 percent of subscribers to video programming services had cable - a drop of about 1 percent compared to 2005.

Satellite television's share of the market increased from about 27.7 percent to 29.2 percent, according to a report released in January.

"It's been a trend nationwide and I'm sure that's the case locally," said David Petsolt, a spokesman for DirecTV.

Gary Underwood, a spokesman for Time Warner, said that with the Internet and television listings available in print there isn't a great need for the TV Guide Channel anymore, which occupies a much greater amount of space on the company's network than digital cable channels.

These kinds of decisions aren't made lightly, Underwood noted, but the company strives to balance the needs of basic, or analog cable, subscribers while keeping abreast with technological developments that permit new and improved services to be offered to a growing number of digital cable subscribers.

Many of these services- digital phone, high-speed internet, video on demand and high-definition television- have become available through upgrades made almost a decade ago at the heart of Time Warner's infrastructure, an equipment-laden building called the "headend" in Nederland.

Satellite signals collected at the adjacent dish farm are processed by equipment in the center, after which dozens of lasers fire into bundles of flexible, glass fibers that carry the light signals to hundreds of neighborhood nodes.

At the nodes, the signals are converted to radio frequencies and transferred by cables that stretch the last few feet into people's homes.

While the fiber-optics allow the system to do a whole lot more, the demand on it also is increasing.

"If you want more Internet, you have to cut back on channels," said Harley R. Myler, an electrical engineering professor at Lamar University whose research focuses on telecommunications.

"As more people start using Internet television, downloading songs and playing videos, bandwidth demands on the Internet will get greater and greater and the place to take it is regular channels."

The amount of data that can be carried along a cable is limited and once allowed around 75 channels to be transmitted. By compressing data, which is then decoded with a digital cable box, cable companies can cram 10 channels worth of content into the same slot occupied by one analog channel.

Data demand is liable to increase exponentially during the next few years. Researchers already have begun working on Ultra High Definition Television, Myler noted, a technology that he predicted people will use to convert entire walls in their homes into enormous multimedia screens, similar to the devices referenced in Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451".

These steroid-enhanced televisions could essentially allow two people visiting over video phone to feel as if they were sitting in separate rooms of the same house, Myler said, but at a tremendous bandwidth cost.

Just as researchers are working on technologies that can drastically increase the impact on infrastructure, others are working on improving how efficiently it's transmitted.

Ordinarily a set-top box is receiving every channel that's available. With digital channel switching, a system Time Warner has started using in some markets, only the channels most frequently viewed are transmitted non-stop.

When a viewer decides to watch a less commonly viewed channel, a signal is sent to Time Warner equipment instructing it to begin transmitting that channel, a process that Underwood said happens so quickly that changing channels still is virtually instantaneous.